I said that I would never write a blog…

But hey… I said that I would never have an Italian boyfriend; I said that I would never work as a flight attendant; I said that I would never be a millionaire… I’m not a millionaire but I added it to the list because I always seem to do the things that I say I will never do…

When a friend told me that he taught English on the telephone a little voice inside me said, you could never do that!!!

I was teaching English in students’ houses at the time, running around from house to house and spending a fortune on petrol! A vacancy came up at the school that my friend worked for and the next thing I knew I was having an interview on the telephone. I was so nervous before my first class.

Fifteen months later and I have 24 telephone classes a week; my students are all busy professionals. I teach pharmacists, vets, salesmen, engineers, biologists, psychologists and bankers and I have students in Barcelona, Valencia and Galicia. I’m so happy and my students are amazing!

I’ve been trying to work out why students enjoy telephone classes so much and I think that there are various reasons. Firstly I think that a lot of students study English for years and reach a very high standard of reading and writing but they don’t get chance to practise with natives. But why are telephone classes more effective than regular conversation classes?

A lot of people aren’t brave enough to try telephone classes but those who are never look back! Some of my students started off with a low level of English, they found it very difficult to speak English on the telephone and even more difficult to understand what I was saying. They were exhausted after every class and I was too but we persevered and now I feel like I spend my days talking to friends! I send articles before every class but my students don’t usually have time to read them so we improvise. We talk about the weather, we talk about our children, we talk about what we did at the weekend, we talk about what we’re going to do at the weekend, we talk about life…

And that I think is the secret of telephone classes!

It’s so difficult to simulate real conversation in the classroom! Students feel embarrassed to talk about their personal lives, they feel embarrassed because the teacher is looking at them, they feel embarrassed because the other students are looking at them and what happens? They clam up. On the other hand students open up on the telephone, they tell me things that they don’t tell their friends or their colleagues and I think it’s because of the anonymity. I’ve never met any of my students so we are almost like virtual friends and some students say that the classes feel like therapy!

Speaking on the telephone in a foreign language is incredibly difficult, the telephone acts as a barrier, you have no eye contact, you can’t use sign language or draw pictures but like any other challenge in life, face it and it disappears!

So why do busy professionals prefer telephone classes to face-to-face classes? A lot of them need to practise speaking on the telephone because they have to take part in conference calls in English and they also like the flexibility that telephone classes offer. Most students opt for two half-hour classes a week but if a meeting comes up they can reschedule the class providing they give 24 hours notice. They can do the classes from home, from the office or they can even do their classes while they’re away on business!

So why am I writing a blog about telephone classes? Well I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this but language has been my passion for the past 25 years and I’d just like to share a few of my thoughts. People say that I have a natural gift for languages but that couldn’t be further from the truth! At school I dropped Latin at the first opportunity and out of the 9 ‘O’ levels that I took French was the only one that I failed! I thought that I would never speak a foreign language but then I met an Italian while working on cruise liners and went to live in Italy with him and his family.

Riccardo’s sisters practised their English with me until one day his Mother banned me from speaking English, she said that everyone was learning English but I wasn’t learning Italian. As I didn’t speak a word of Italian I lived in my own world, trapped inside my own head. I almost lost my mind, I had no mental stimulation, I couldn’t understand the conversations around me, or the TV, or books, or magazines…Time seemed to stand still, the minutes felt like hours and the hours felt like days but three months later I woke up one morning and realised that I could speak Italian. They say that total submersion is the easiest way to learn a language but I disagree, it might be the quickest but there’s nothing easy about it!

In those three months something inside my brain changed. I felt as though I’d found the key and unlocked a door that led me to place in my mind where languages were easy. I took my TEFL course and since then I’ve learned French and Spanish as well a little bit of Catalan. I think that being someone who has no natural talent for languages helps me to be patient with students and I have lots of ideas about learning languages that I want to share in this blog.

We all know that children are sponges and will pick up a foreign language in no time but adults find it much more difficult and I think that one of the reasons for that is the focus on grammar. Grammar is important but the rules are so complicated that you would have to be a genius to learn to speak a language by learning them; half of us probably wouldn’t speak our mother tongue if we’d learned it in the classroom!